This book examines the importance of the animal in modern art theory, using classic texts of modern aesthetics and texts written by modern artists to explore the influence of the human-animal relationship on nineteenth and twentieth century artists and art theorists. The book is unique due to its focus on the concept of the animal, rather than on images of animals, and it aims towards a theoretical account of the connections between the notions of art and animality in the modern age. Roni Grén’s book spans various disciplines, such as art theory, art history, animal studies, modernism, postmodernism, posthumanism, philosophy, and aesthetics.

This is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets, and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.

Wars have always been connected to images. From the representation of war on maps, panoramas, and paintings to the modern visual media of photography, film, and digital screens, images have played a central role in representing combat, military strategy, soldiers, and victims. Such images evoke a whole range of often unexpected emotions from ironic distance to boredom and disappointment. Why is that? This book examines the emotional language of war images, how they entwine with various visual technologies, and how they can build emotional communities. The book engages in a cross-disciplinary dialogue between visual studies, literary studies, and media studies by discussing the links between images, emotions, technology, and community. From these different perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature and workings of war images from 1800 until today, and it offers a frame for thinking about the meaning of the images in contemporary wars.

This book investigates how British contemporary artists who work with clay have managed, in the space of a single generation, to take ceramics from niche-interest craft to the pristine territories of the contemporary art gallery. This development has been accompanied (and perhaps propelled) by the kind of critical discussion usually reserved for the 'higher' discipline of sculpture. Ceramics is now encountering and colliding with sculpture, both formally and intellectually. Laura Gray examines what this means for the old hierarchies between art and craft, the identity of the potter, and the character of a discipline tied to a specific material but wanting to participate in critical discussions that extend far beyond clay.

From caged orangutans to roasted pig, from dog training to horse phobias, from communicating bees to ruminating cows, over the course of an introduction and four thematically organised chapters Derek Ryan explores how animals are encountered in theoretica

This study concentrates on the discourses around animal death in arts and the ways they changed over time. Chapter topics span from religious symbolism to natural history cabinets, from hunting laws to animal rights, from economic history to formalist views on art. In other words, the book asks why artists have represented animal death in visual culture, maintaining that the practice has, through the whole era, been a crucial part of the understanding of our relation to the world and our identity as humans. This is the first truly integrative book-length examination of the depiction of dead animals in Western art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, animal studies, and cultural history.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of new and more sympathetic understanding of animals as philosophy, literature, and art argued that animals could feel and therefore possess inalienable rights. This idea gave birth to a diverse movement that affects how we understand our relationship to the natural world. The Cry of Nature details a crucial period in the history of this movement, revealing the significant role art played in the growth of animal rights. Stephen F. Eisenman shows how artists from William Hogarth to Pablo Picasso and Sue Coe have represented the suffering, chastisement, and execution of animals. These artists, he demonstrates, illustrate the lessons of Montaigne, Rousseau, Darwin, Freud, and others—that humans and animals share an evolutionary heritage of sentience, intelligence, and empathy, and thus animals deserve equal access to the domain of moral right. Eisenman also traces the roots of speciesism to the classical world and describes the social role of animals in the demand for emancipation. Instructive, challenging, and always engaging, The Cry of Nature is a book for anyone interested in animal rights, art history, and the history of ideas.